Mitchell Smith (46 page)

“Any burn can be ‘very nice’ for one meal.”

“We’re going out again. . . .”

Nardone leaned forward and patted Ellie’s knee. “That’s better. That’s more like it. -Now, we’re talkin’ a relationship.”

“Tommy, why don’t you get going-have some lunch?”

Nardone stood up, and began to stack the shoe boxes and reports to the side of his desk. “O.K…. 0. K. I’m not going’ to bother you about it. It’s strictly your business.”

“Thank you.”

T_

“I got some news. -I got lucky. They put Siniscola forward to this afternoon, so I can go get that over with-three o’clock, an’ then they’ll break for dinner, then till whenever the hell they get to it-an’

we’ll just have the mornin’ in court tomorrow. We could go out an’ get that boat shit done in the afternoon.”

“Good,” Ellie said, and sat down in his chair. “-What did you get done, here?”

“I finished the whole year’s worth of bills-you got the ones I pulled out there on the long sheet. Take a look at ern, see what you think.”

“O. K.”

“Thin left to do, is go through all the rest of the papers an’ that’s plenty. I looked through ‘em, but I didn’t go through ‘ern. -They’re back here. . . .” He leaned down behind the desk, picked up a cardboard carton so she could see it, and put it back down. “More there than you’re going’ to get done this afternoon-an’ you got to get everythin’ back down to Torres before six. -Don’t forget the pinks on this stuff.”

“O.K.”

, ‘I got to be back here this evenin’, anyway, make some calls, get some stuff done. I can take it down . . ..”

“No, Tommy-I’ll take care of it. Who’s got watch?”

“Murray.”

“O.K. I’ll give him the pinks; he can lock them in Leahy’s desk.”

“O.K.,” Nardone said. “Well … I’m going’. See you in the mornin’.”

“You didn’t bring a raincoat?”

“I’ll buy an umbrella,” Nardone said, halfway up the aisle, then turned around and came back. “You know,” he said, “the guy’s got two kids-little boys.”

“I know; he told me. Tommywill you get the fuck out of here?”

“Hey, watch that language,” Graham said, on his way past to Leahy’s office. “-This is City property, here.”

The train was a freight-a long transcontinental with collected cars from half a dozen lines linked for the pull east, a mountainous red-and-white double diesel on the haul. This locomotive, which had worked so hard to pull the load up into and through the hills, now worked nearly as hard to control the train, to keep the tons of rolling stock from wheeling free down shelving slopes to the narrow valley floor, where an evening town and an evening station waited, lights glowing yellow through the gloaming.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Tucker —on some vacation here, playing with some goddamn trains?” The Colonel’s breath-his voice’s volume damped, its pitch quite high-smelled of scotch and cinnamon.

Having introduced himself, the Colonel’s own attention was momentarily claimed as the great diesel whistled, and rumbled slowly, then slower still, into the station switching, at the last moment, from track two to track three, to ease away from the passenger platform and into freight loading.

The Colonel hadn’t startled Tucker, but he’d surprised him unpleasantly, and the sergeant straightened up from his concentration on the electric train and felt with his left hand to be certain of his FAO Schwarz shopping bag-set at his feet when he’d first fallen into the evening world spread out under lamp-lit cotton clouds on a great table weighted with hills, tunnels, the small town, and miles and miles of shining track. It was only, or almost only at such times, when confronted with a marvelous toy of this sort, or a boy’s more particular article of play

…

a mitt, or bat, or BB gun … that Tucker felt some pang considering his house of women.

The shopping bag was full. -He’d bought Jacklyn a small gold pin at Tiffany; it was shaped like a honey bee, and, for eyes, had tiny pearls.

Then, at this store, he’d bought a complete nurse’s outfit for Kameesha-plastic thermometer (oral), stethoscope, fake IV setup with tube and stick-on plastic needle, and a white uniform dress and cap.

He’d bought Kimana a Green Berette kit fatigues, rubber combat-knife, two gray plastic grenades, and a plastic assault rifle that clucked rapidly when its trigger was pulled.

“Sergeant,” the Colonel keeping his voice down as two adults and three small children circulated past, heading for airplane models. “-I really do not appreciate having to chase across town on that fool Mason’s say-so, tracking you down. We have a crisis situation!” The Colonel was wearing his British Warm. Rain had wet the wool, and it smelled.

“Sorry, sir,” Tucker said.

“-Do you have to wear those goddamn glasses?”

“No, sir. I have contacts.”

“Well-take the fucking things off!” A breeze of scotch.

“For your information, Sergeant, you have provided a portrait parlant for every stupid flatfoot in the city. Goldrimmed glasses! -You’re supposed to be a professional!”

Two of the small children who had just passed them, now wandered back, bored by airplanes, to watch the red-and-white locomotive pulling out of the station-and the Colonel, tugging at Tucker’s sleeve, steered him away toward a wall of small robots, each standing before its empty, stacked box, glittering, peering with bright eyes red, green, or amber.

Tucker took his glasses off and put them in his raincoat pocket.

“-I’ve just been informed that you, Budreau, and Mason have been made.

-Budreau and Mason are already down in the safe in Greenwich Village, and that’s where you’re heading, pronto, Two junkies at that methadone clinic can supposedly identify all three of you that great idea!-you, by those damn glasses, just like at the Classman thing.”

“Those two people should be no problem, sir,” Tucker said, and picked up a robot, a small, stocky, bright gold machine with fat, articulated legs, green eyes, and a car-grill grin. It was dressed like a boxer, in shorts and high-lace athletic shoes. Tucker shifted a silver lever at the robot’s chest, and the machine, batteried for display, squawked a sentence in what sounded like French, put up its small, gloved fists, and began to pat irregularly at Tucker’s chest.

I

“The junkies aren’t the problem, Sergeant. The investigating officer running them is the problem. Pursuing the investigation. -Pursuing it!

The New York City Police Department is the problem.”

Tucker put the little robot back in front of its box, and it spoke, and sparred busily with a larger, murderous blue machine, horn-headed and armed with a small ax, but silent and still.

“Let’s move … let’s move,” the Colonel said, took Tucker’s sleeve again, and towed him away down the wall of robots to the second floor’s central aisle.

“It seems to me, sir,” Tucker said, `—that this would be a really good time to get our asses out of this town.”

“And I might agree with you, Sergeant,” the Colonel said, and walked to the left around a cashier’s station to avoid a young woman, dressed as a clown, handing out balloons to children passing by. `-However, Washington does not agree with you. -They think these assholes in blue have been handing us nothing but bullshit since this mission came up.

Beginning with steering us to try and recruit that goddamn maniac that murdered Bob. -They think our police friends are being very cute, pushing us to see how far we’ll push-playing politics, sticking their big New York Democratic noses into a very delicate matter of national security.”

The young woman dressed as a clown-red fright-wig, white polka-dotted costume, an enormous lipstick smile had, full of initiative, trotted around the cashier’s station to intercept them, now performed a giant-shoe shuffle, and handed them each a balloon. Tucker, a blue. The Colonel’s, orange.

“Let’s get the hell out of here. The Colonel, gripping the string of his balloon, headed for the escalator, and Tucker-pausing to give the blue to a young man with a baby in his arms-followed after, catching up to the Colonel halfway down. ‘-We have orders,” the Colonel said, “—4o call these people’s bluff. Raise and call.”

On their way to the front door, walking against a tide of children and patient parents, eddies and whirlpools of toddlers around the stuffed animals, Tucker said, “Sir, we’re not fooling with a bunch of Centrals here, don’t know better than shit in their breakfast. -We already lost one man, just screwing around.”

“Tell me about it,” the Colonel said, and had difficulty getting his balloon through the revolving door.

The walk was windswept, the air still damp and cool, remembering rain.

“Ours not to reason why, Tuck,” the Colonel said, and released his balloon to ride the weather.

At just after four, Ellie left Headquarters, walked over to the Lexington line through slight, wayward breezes, the tiger-stripe shadows of traveling overcast, and took the train up to Sixty-eighth.

She walked east toward the hospital from there, the wind, blowing a little harder as she neared the river, tugging at the hem of her raincoat, opening the coat below its last button, toying with that flap and letting it fall. Ellie thought of Audrey Birnbaum as she walked, and hoped the woman wouldn’t look too dreadful. A vision of a huge black plumber’s assistant lying swollen, dying, massive new breasts with milking nipples exposed by the down-turned sheet as he stared up at the ceiling TV. -Pro football . . . opening game of the season. A yellow, murderous rolling eye when Ellie walked into the room. . . .

Tired of imagining this, standing on an uptown corner on First, waiting for the light, Ellie began to review her day instead, saving until last her lunch with the Stakeout man-who’d been as tall as she’d remembered, but harsher-faced, not as handsome. He was wearing brown slacks, white shirt, a dark brown sports jacket, tan raincoat. Loafers. They’d eaten lunch at Chow-Chow’s, and at Shea’s prompting, “Let’s get sick-make it memorable,” they’d ordered four chili dogs, fat fries, and black and-white shakes.

“I hear your partner’s a damn good cop,” Shea had said when they found a side booth beneath a wall-sized photograph of Lou Gehrig saying goodbye to Yankee Stadium.

“He checked on you, too,” Ellie said.

Shea had talked of this and that, then mentioned his young boys. “-About a year after Celeste died, every lady in Sheepshead Bay was looking for a mother type for me. I was the target of the year.”

“No longer?”

“They gave up. -I wasn’t looking for a mother for the boys. I figured if I was lucky enough to find a woman I loved-loved me, well, she’d be a mother to the boys if she felt like it-and if she didn’t … that would just be their bad luck. Kids have to take their chances getting loved, just the way we do.”

The chili dogs had been awful. They each ate their two, then ordered one more and split it.

Shea had done two years at Fordham law before joining the Force, and was still being pressured ‘to go back and finish. “-But I just can’t get it done. That’s a profession is either boring or disgusting-it’s even worse than police work.”

:‘But you like police work.”

“I love police work.”

He talked about a case two of his men were handlings heartbreaker. A plainclothesman named Taubman, on stake-out with two others at a gas station on Staten Island, had, last spring, shot and permanently paralyzed a fifteen-year-old boy who tried to rob the place with his grandfather’s revolver. The attempted robbery had been a bluff, the revolver unloaded. The grandfather, who’d raised the boy, was a retired Suffolk County cop-and in August, at the boy’s request, had procured another pistol, gone to the hospital, and shot his grandson to death.

“I read about it,” Ellie said.

“My people are trying to prove it was a temporary insanity thing—depositions from the old guy’s doctor and his friends-keep the poor bastard out of prison . . . not that they’d put him away for long. -Well, let me be honest. My people will prove it was a temporary insanity thing. Period. There’s enough tragedy, without making it worse. Harry Taubman’s a basket case, as it is. Kid gave him no time to say maybe.”

Ellie had mentioned the Gaither case and its circumstances, and Shea found it odd. “-All kind of cold and careful, wasn’t it? -Even if she died hard. Man kills a beautiful woman, it’s usually kind of sudden, sloppy. Not so careful. Not so neat.”

While they were finishing their milk shakes, Ellie mentioned her painting, her old art classes-comparing that to his two years at law school.

“No comparison,” Shea’d said, abruptly. “-Painting’s more worthwhile.

You sound like you’re ashamed of not staying with it-right?”

“No, I’m not,” Ellie said.

He’d picked up his metal milk-shake container, and poured the last into her glass. “I’ll tell you what-you come out hunting with me this year-you don’t have to shoot any birds. You come out and look at the colors on the Sound just before the sun comes up. Everything out there looks like silver, you know, with some tarnish on it? -You come out there and paint that. You give that a try. You don’t freeze, you’ll get some damn good work done.”

He’d kissed her on the cheek, when they parted after lunch, and said he’d call her. “Not tomorrow,” he’d said.

“-You’ll need time to digest me and the chili dogs. . . .”

Ellie turned at the hospital’s gate, at the entrance drive, then went up the curved concrete walk—only three or four early autumn leaves scudding across the pavement–climbed the wide steps into the building’s lobby, stopped at reception-information, and asked an elderly oriental woman for Audrey Birnbaum’s room number.

The woman asked for the spelling of Birnbaum, then looked up the name on her Rolodex.

“Mrs. Birnbaum is on Communicable, seventh floor, room seven-fourteen.

You’ll need to check with the station nurse before you go in.” The elderly woman had a girl’s thick, gleaming black hair. The rich tarry fall looked odd framing her round, soft, crumpled face . . . as if a Chinese princess had been cursed by a witch to suddenly suffer age.